


Forests may hide, but we can See

by Hawkbringer



Series: Hawkbringer's Greatest Hits [3]
Category: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi | Spirited Away, 君の名は。| Kimi no Na wa. | Your Name.
Genre: Dream Journal, Dreams, F/M, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Flying, Forest Bathing, Lots of Crying, Middle School, Mountains, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Sen and Chihiro as different people, Sight with a capital S, Sketches, Sort Of, for kimi no na wa, for spirited away, friendship between oddballs, thinning the barrier between worlds, voluntary apotheosis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-21 05:01:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19996273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hawkbringer/pseuds/Hawkbringer
Summary: Set three years after Chihiro's adventure, but before Mitsuha's. The town Chihiro's family moved to is the one Mitsuha has always known. She forms an uneasy understanding with the oddball girl who spends too long in the forest after school, sometimes chases things unseen, talks to herself, and waits to See it, without knowing what it is. But when Chihiro finally Sees it, Mitsuha cannot follow.





	Forests may hide, but we can See

**Author's Note:**

> I loved Kimi No Na Wa. and of course the comparisons to Miyazaki's seminal works were inescapable. I watched both in quick succession and decided to make the protagonists be friends. I have made several attempts at a happy-romance-ending for Haku and Chihiro, and I think I finally managed it with this.
> 
> Come find me on Tumblr and Twitter as Hawkbringerandstubby!

"It's something I was _born_ with. It's a curse." 

"It's a gift, to me." Sen smiles - she IS Sen, out here, someone else, intimately intertwined with the forest, its spirits, its creatures. She doesn't forget who she was, but out here, she becomes someone she _isn't_. Someone slightly _other_. 

"I wasn't born with it," Sen admits, glancing down to the tadpole pound Mitsuha has found her at. "I was _given_ it. So I'm taking care of it." 

"What, this pond?" 

Sen laughs, and it's a _cute_ sound, dipping down just briefly into a lower octave, hinting at the color the sound will have when she's fully grown, something arresting, lingering, like watching the trees in autumn. 

"No-no, no. Someone else owns this pond, not me. Well," she muses, looking up to the sky briefly, eyes widening as she catches a flash of red flitting among the leaves, (Mitsuha catches it too, but doesn't mention it for the same reason Sen doesn't - it's not supposed to be visible, and they both assume the other can't See,) "Not like _owns_ , exactly. But, you know..." 

"Watches over. In charge of," Mitsuha supplies without much prompting as Sen's voice peters out for lack of a specific word. 

"Yeah," she murmurs to the pond, not even looking at Mitsuha now. "In charge of. The commander? The steward...?" 

A blast of cold breeze ruffles both girls' hair as they crouch over the leaf-strewn path in the forest. They're halfway through their final year of middle school, and of course there's no question where either of them are going to go after this. 

True freedom is out of reach, for both of them, Mitsuha muses to herself as she straightens up and tugs her jacket closer around her shoulders, looks back towards her bike. But cell service is out of reach here too, and there are still enough leaves clinging to their trees to muffle any shouted names. There's nothing quite like the freedom of being out in the forest, and being trusted to be home in time for dinner. For these few hours after school, for Chihiro, at least, there's very little she couldn't do. 

"I'll... see you at school, I guess..." Mitsuha half-heartedly bids goodbye to her classmate from the other side of the wooded path, straddling her bicycle and somehow loathe to look away from the plain, dour-faced girl muttering titles to herself while studying a bunch of tadpoles swimming in a ditch. She calls back something vague that indicates she heard, at least, and Mitsuha shrugs her shoulders and kicks off and sails away. Sen remains in the forest, although Chihiro leaves soon after, and some days it's _that_ girl Mitsuha talks to after school, the one that doesn't live here, the one that's _waiting_ , behind Chihiro's eyes.

\---

The dreams, the memories, the images, come floating back in pieces, and Chihiro treasures each one. Faces crudely drawn, monstrous figures roughly rendered, decorating the margins of a scrapbook containing cut-outs and flowers and notes on names and moon phases, drawings that get better and better over time, of toads and slugs and frogs and radishes. She always has to chuckle when she dreams of that one. 

She's taller now than she was in the dream, she realizes that, comparing her eyeline to walls and doorways, to others' waists and chins, even her own feet to the wood slats of the floor. One memorable occasion had her petting a pig's nose and the thing was _gargantuan_ , she recognizes that, but her hand too was a different shape, fingernails shorter where they grew out of her skin. 

Her interest in scrapbooking is encouraged by her family, when they notice that's what she's up to. They still drive to bigger towns, take the one train down out of the mountains a few times a month. Her mother buys Chihiro expensive paper and very small, very sharp knives. She collages photographs of her own face on one page, all different ages, then the faces of others as she goes, later on. She figures out how old she was, _is_ , in the dream. 

It doesn't take her long to notice that it's all the _same_ dream, just spread out over days, over months. She sees the same places, the same faces, but new customers, over and over, a new one each night for _months_ before she begins to feel that days are repeating. 

Her co-workers (when did she ever _work_? At her age?) speak in snatches of conversation of big events that Chihiro-in-the-dream seems to remember witnessing herself, the herbal cake carefully wrapped up close to her heart, always carried with her, just in case; the windfall; a _dragon_... Paper cut-outs flecked with blood. A set of clothes she knows she owns but feels she shouldn't take, a couple of onigiri that no food she's ever eaten could ever compare to. Mud, rain, vomit everywhere, one of the only days she rises from sleep nauseated, terrified, chased by something too terrible for words. Shoes grown too small that she forces on anyways. Waiting for a train. A lamp in the forest, bobbing ahead to light her way. The droning of a fly in her ear. A spinning wheel. Feeling even smaller than ever in a baby's room built for a giant - she agonizes over this one for _months_ before the face of the very-short giantess surfaces in her mind - eyes wide as her shoulders, lacquered nails long as her arm. Swimming. Underwater, hands clenched around-- 

She throws herself up out of bed, hair in disarray, hands already reaching for the journal, for the pen, screaming internally for the details to remain... All she captures is a sense of _the color_. The color of the water she swam in. A light, translucent teal. None of her colored pencils match it, of course, but the many hastily-scrawled squares in several similar shades do well enough to remind her, once the light of dawn breaks over the horizon. The rest of the day passes as though seen from behind that same water - muted, wavering. She feels almost as though she isn't really _there_ , that she's somewhere else, and waiting... for herself? She doesn't know.

\--

Chihiro recognizes the last bell's significance well enough to gather her papers and place them all in her bag. She removes her school shoes from her feet at the lockers, picks up her outdoor ones. Then she makes the mistake of looking up. Not a mistake, _can't_ be a mistake, her other brain, her other self, chides her as she drops bag and shoes alike and rushes out the door only to slip on the threshold. _You don't need your shoes or your socks, just leave them._

"Hai," she mutters to herself, taking her eyes off the figure in the distance for just a moment to slip the offending items off her feet, deaf to the yelps and groans of her classmates behind her. Mitsuha is too far behind - when she makes her way to the entrance, drawn by the complaining, Chihiro has already disappeared up the road to the forest.

No, that's not quite right. _Chihiro_ is gone, _Sen_ disappears into the forest, certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that she saw him, the cut of his hair, the flash of his pale hand. She slows down once inside the forest, feeling, Hearing the chattering of what she has learned are called _kami_ , the spirits of the forest, excitedly repeating the same idea over and over. They don't tell her anything she doesn't already know, but they do remind her not to hurry. _He's here._ He's not going anywhere, and running too recklessly without shoes, in the out of doors, could cause her injury. 

She heaves a deeply-relieved sigh, the awareness of her feet throbbing slowly rising in her brain. Breathing deeply to calm her racing heart, she puts her hands on her knees and her shoulders sag. Once calmed, she straightens back up, and realizes the kami's chatter has been washed away. Is their silence born of awe or has her Hearing gone? All her senses reaching, she turns towards the figure half-sliding, half-stumbling down the mountainside, ancient grey traveling cloak impeding more than protecting. He hisses out a sharp breath as he catches his footing, draws himself up and turns his head towards her. He blinks, and they are somewhere Else. But Sen doesn't move at all.

Not until he breathes, "Chihiro," her real name, not the name he knows her by, not the one that... Her eyes well with tears and she chokes on the idea of saying the truncated, dismembered form of his, _Haku_ , and doesn't make a sound. They stumble towards each other, and Haku wrestles off the cloak. He's solid in her arms, his shoulder bony and warm beneath her chin. She sobs and he's merely smiling, she can hear it in his voice as he murmurs, his whole story, tells her how he looked for her, how he cursed his foolishness, the moment he realized he had overlooked the very _closest_ location to where he had left her. Where she had left _him_. "I never imagined the answer was so close to me the whole time. I can't believe how long it took me to find you."

"Almost 3 years," Sen informs him through warbling tears. 

"That long? Oh, I'm so sorry," he breathes, hands on her back and nose pressing into her hair. There is silence as they hum to each other, testing each other's health and solidity by feel. She almost doesn't want to ask, but the frog won't leave her throat until she does. 

"Ha... Ha..." She still can't say his name. "How long... can you stay?"

His arms drop then, drawing back to clasp her by the elbows and the air drains out of her lungs as she sees his eyebrows sag, sees him smile thinly. She knows exactly what he's going to say. 

"The real question is, how long can _you_?" She hiccups again, tries to tell herself it's just a holdover from her sobbing from earlier.

"I...I live here now. My... My friends, my family... I, eheh, I've come to love this place. Not even really the town, just, the woods here. There's a river..." she offers, certain he'd like to see it, whatever kind of god he is. 

His eyes brighten and his hands clasp around hers. 

"Let's go and see it," he enthuses, stepping up into thin air with their hands still clasped and telling her to lead the way. Flying with him feels so very much like memory, she thinks, that even the tears she sheds, as she moves through the air like so much water, give her a sense of deja vu. 

Arriving at the riverbank, she can see he's a little disappointed. It isn't much of a river now, of course, the dry season beginning and the river's spirit probably gone to sleep for winter, or gone _away_. She hadn't thought of it like that before, that perhaps the spirits _leave_ in winter, when everything dies. When the spirit of snow comes back to roost. 

"Do they leave? When winter comes?" she thinks to ask him, knowing that he'd know. "The spirits of the forest, I mean." 

"Some of them do," he muses, settling on the bank to put his sandal-clad feet into the water and encouraging her to do the same. She wonders if the fizzing sensation she feels is some sort of healing magic or just her imagination. She's aware she has two choices and she chooses to believe. "It's not a matter of time or space so much, for spirits." His face falls. "As long as your home is still there to return to..." 

/Oh.../

"Nigihayami Kohakunushi," she states, like a fact, and he turns his head to face her, something so stupefied in his gaze, so on fire behind it, that she has to laugh. Not for very long, though, because she had dodged his first question, and he has answered hers, so far. "I know who you are, now. I didn't always." 

He shakes his head gently to disperse her worry. "It's not a matter of time for we spirits," he reminds her, and, partly to demonstrate her point, she interrupts. 

"But it _is_ for us mortals! As long as... I still am one?" She glances at him sideways until he nods in reassurance. 

"You are one... for now." 

"Nnngh," she groans impatiently. "Do you know when I'm gonna die?" 

His eyes widen and he turns towards her, taking one foot out of the river. "Chihiro! Why do you want to know that!?" 

"Because..." she scrubs at her face, embarrassed that she hasn't run out of tears yet, wondering how long they've been stored up, that there seems to be such a surfeit of them left to spill, "If I die, I can join with you, right? Become a spirit like you, right?" 

He shakes his head bitterly. "It's not that easy. You have to be a god OF somewhere, or OF something. Which means a lot of time working at something. Half your waking hours, or so I hear. Didn't do it myself. I've been a god for a _long_ time, Chihiro." 

She bites her lip and looks down. He reaches out to gently lift her chin and gazes into her eyes with infinite gentleness. "And of all the humans I've ever met, I chose to come back for you." His hand slides back over her cheek to her neck. "Never forget how deeply I love you." 

Chihiro can't help her keening or her renewed ugly crying, and tries to hide both by burying her face into Haku's collar and dragging lines into his clothes with her fingers. He laughs at himself for going overboard, and apologizes for embarrassing her, but regretfully informs her that it is time for her to leave. The sun is setting over on 'her' world's side, the changing of the seasons shrinking the number of daylight hours they can share together. 

As he crosses the two of them back over, and follows Chihiro's directions back to her house by flight, Chihiro holds on tightly and tries not to fear this was all another dream. 

With an unconcerned smile, he presses a kiss to her forehead, removes his cloak from her shoulders and pulls it back on over his own. "If it is, you'll dream it again tomorrow. I will see you again, Chihiro. Try going down to the bay tomorrow. I may have enough power to give us more time, then." 

"I'll see you again?" 

"You'll see me again," he promises, just the same as he did when last their hands touched, and she feels the same certainty as their fingers separate, the same trust, the same willingness to wait, no matter how long it takes, because of _course_ he would be worth it. Of _course_.

\--

Still riding high on the elation of seeing him again, she answered her mother's questions about her whereabouts as vaguely as she always would, marveling at her mother's easy acceptance of 'sketching in the forest' as an answer, and wonders if her mother thinks about Chihiro choosing the arts as a career. Closing the sliding door to her small and messy bedroom, Chihiro glances at her sketchbook and has a sudden flash of inspiration. If that _was_ all a dream, and she's _still_ asleep, what if she writes it all down now as she remembers it, and checks it in the morning to see if it's there? And thus she spends her remaining waking hours instead of studying or anything else.

When she wakes with yet more memories to jot down in the grimoire, she knows they are memories now, _seeing Haku_ proved that to her. She is ecstatic to see a dozen pages filled in that weren't yesterday, more faces, more snippets of information, and an account of an encounter in the forest that went slightly differently than how it did in the dream she's just awoken from...

**Author's Note:**

> Basically, they just hang out in the surrounding forests, visit nearby rivers, walk along the super-rocky-beach of the crater-lake, that sort of thing. Chihiro learns/builds piecemeal her destiny as a god-to-be of the mountains, perhaps even a patron saint of the town. And so though her lover must leave her for most of the day, and though _she_ must leave the town for a while to go become a political activist and fight the Diet in Tokyo to win a restoration of _some_ of the Kohaku river, even if it is smaller and farther away from where it once ran, she feels that she /has/ to do this to empower her beloved, so that he can visit her more often. 
> 
> She talks with him about naming some tributary of the nearby mountain Kohaku, and naming the mouth after _her_. And she has some inspirational-sounding reason for why she wants to be named for the mouth that would eternally sing his name, sing his praises, down the mountainside each moment of each day. (whoops, mouth is the /delta/, not the /source/. Fuck, that makes the metaphor about singing him into existence fall apart.) LOL, how about they make a sign, a fuckin' commorateive-battle type sign, telling an 'ancient legend' that says it is part of that canon of myths that Mitsuha's grandmother was always going on about, having been lost in a fire, and Chihiro has Mitsuha convientely discover it IN ORDER TO ADVANCE PRAISE AND THOUGHTS AND OFFERINGS TO HAKU AND HERSELF TO SPEED APOTHEOSIS (is that the right term?) AND THEY GROW THEIR POWERS AROUND TEH ENTIRE MOUNTAIN LIKE A GARDEN WITH THAT TOWN AS THE CROWN JEWEL. DOES SHE DIE YOUNG VIA SUICIDE OR VIA THE DAMN METEOR IN 3 YEARS OR WHAT THE FUCK. OR IS SHE SUPER-OLD AND SHIT, IDFK. I have a weakness for characters that become stewards and cultivate their own legacy as a symbiotic meme-legend to become as gods. Pretty super-sweet, I'd fuckin' say.


End file.
